Owing to the fact that, ridiculous as they appeared to Europeans to be, the rumours were believed, and what is more, began to be acted on, by Natives in many parts, it is necessary to consider them seriously, and in so doing, it is possible that some light may be thrown on the inner workings of the black man's mind, and that some of the mystery which still enshrouds the underlying causes of the Rebellion may be removed. The rumours were in the form of a fiat or command, and associated with a personality whose name was never revealed. Neither place nor time was given. All that was known was that the command existed, purported to have come from some one in supreme authority, and peremptorily demanded obedience. The following is the message, given as nearly as possible in the form in which it circulated among the Natives: "_All pigs must be destroyed, as also all white fowls. Every European utensil hitherto used for holding food or eating out of must be discarded and thrown away. Anyone failing to comply will have his kraal struck by a thunderbolt when, at some date in the near future, he sends a storm more terrible than the last, which was brought on by the Basuto king in his wrath against the white race for having carried a railway to the immediate vicinity of his ancestral stronghold._" In some places, it was believed white goats and white cattle were also to be destroyed. Pigs, although kept by many Natives to sell or barter to Europeans, were not eaten by them. They had been introduced by the white race, and were regarded by Natives as creatures whose flesh "smells." The same prejudice did not exist in regard to fowls, for whose presence in the country Europeans, for all the Natives knew, were not responsible. To discriminate, therefore, between white ones and others, as well as between utensils of European manufacture and those of their own, could carry but one meaning to any intelligent mind, and that was that drastic aggressive measures of some kind against the white race were intended. What these were to be every Native knew quite well. He knew it was proposed to rise simultaneously and massacre the whites, although the time the butchery was to take place had still to be fixed. The word "thunderbolt," too, bore metonymic interpretation. The acts or characteristics of a Zulu monarch were frequently, in ordinary parlance, compared with the fury of the elements. On the other hand, in accordance with naïve and deeply-rooted belief, the King, to whom the sky was said to _belong_, was supposed to be able to cause the heavens to pour down or withhold rain at his pleasure, though, to do this, he might be obliged to invoke the assistance of Native kings of other countries. It was, for instance, believed that gentle, copious rains could be induced by the Swazi kings, whilst the kings of Basutoland possessed drugs for bringing on violent thunderstorms, accompanied by lightning, wind and hail. Whenever any of these natural